NCNYUMC.ORG | Spiritual Discipline Part 3

The third section of this essay on the disciplines of prayer is devoted to some matters that are general and characteristic to those who are into the serious and lifetime disciplines of the arts of prayer.

One characteristic is the way in which one is steadily aware of the awesomeness of Creation as such. As with anything else worthwhile, the appreciation of that awesomeness needs practice, lest it lose its magic in the eyes of the beholder.

I can remember experiencing that awesomeness, for one example, on the top of Mt. Colden, in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, in the early fall. Just as we were about to crawl into sleeping bags for the night, taking a last look at the stars when without warning, the moon peeped over the top of the mountains.

It took our breath away, and rapidly rose clear of the mountain tops until there it stood, all orange, as seen through the heavier lateral atmosphere, the classic harvest moon. All the craters could clearly be seen without telescope or binoculars because of that atmospheric enlargement.

Apart from the majesty of the vision we were experiencing, there was one other item feeding into our awareness, and that was the Silence of the moment. A profound Silence, unmarred by traffic or airplane, an experience that must have been common in Jesus' time.

The Adirondacks in general are the remains, after millions of years, of mountains that once rivaled the Alps in Europe. Still to be seen are fossils of sea life wherever one looks, which to me, reveals the system of an infinitely slow process of building up and wearing down, a regular heartbeat of the Universe, as another friend puts it, that can only lead one to realize that at least one purpose of all that heartbeat of the Universe is that I might be. That life might be.

I am literally made of stardust, in other words. The Universe exists that I might exist. All the argument about the purpose of life stops there. For me, that presents me with a constant sense of awesomeness about it all, leaving me in a perpetual, must-be-practiced habitual sense of thanksgiving to the Creating God.

That my own disciplines of the arts of prayer inform such a perspective is to be expected, I would be a wooden dummy if that sort of informing didn't spill over into all that I do with my life. And the result of that information, for me, is found in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth: that respect for the dignity of the human being; that caring for people no matter what their status or circumstance.

It seems to be an approach much in the shadows in our time. Prayer helps me remember all this, energizing my mind, heart and soul to preach The Word, as my thanksgiving to God. As Winston Churchill said all those years ago when World War II threatened the destruction of Great Britain, "Never give up; never give up; never give up." As this is being written in February of 2003, moving the human race away from war is again a failure.

Equally disturbing, our American nation is now viewed with scorn by much of the world because of the aggressive selfishness of its political leadership, and what seems lost for the time being is any sense of thanksgiving to God and awe for the Creations of God. Even as the leadership, in an absurd grotesqueness, preaches compassion in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.

Any hopes for such senses of dignity for the human race that are Jesus' major contributions to history rests on those who take the pains to develop their own disciplines of prayer that we might be properly equipped, as in olden times, to take to the roads, the mines, the malls, the fields, the battlefields, the halls of power, anywhere, to preach that precious Gospel that Jesus entrusted to us.

As in Jesus's time, there are always very powerful forces that view the general populations as their rightful sources of income, power, status, and prestige without consideration for the negative states of being imposed on the populations.

And ever since Jesus' time (the Herodian eras, pere et fils, of excess and brutality in Israel), the expectations of the stewards of those matters have been met with ferocious resistance by a ragtag collection of people who refused to be shaped or intimidated by those expectations. They comprise the Christian Church, worldwide. Yet, that Christian Church is made up of two kinds of populations: the first is those people who are amenable to the pressures brought by the powers- that-be; the second is those people who are absolutely defiant of those powers.

This second group is the revolutionary soul of the world. Just the briefest glance at the likes of Mahatma Ghandi bringing down the British Empire in India with his non-violent approach to the issue of loving the British even as he defied them; or of Martin Luther King, Jr., who broke the back of segregation in this nation (for awhile) by his non-violent approach, loving the unlovable white racists, to name but two of our saints in history, gives a stinging look at the possibilities of the grace of God that go mostly untouched. Not to mention all the bloody and frightening struggles by women for liberation.

That ragtag collection of Christian peoples (we are not alone among religions of the world about such considerations, yet all are not dominated by such hopes as Jesus has bequeathed) has little power as understood by the nations of the world, even less influence amongst the powers that be, yet have more decent hopes for the way people could live if only they would set their minds and spirits to the matter than any other concoction of states and nations that we know about.

Ragtag revolutionaries. Not Communists, not fascists, not knee jerk do-gooders, as one unfortunate Congressman said, viewing those who tried in the earlier days to bring de-segregation.

That's Jesus' hope in the face of starvations on a mass scale, about epidemics raging, killing thousands of people daily (in Africa, as I write, for one example), about a deliberately pursued policy of making the masses ignorant, and then keeping them that way.

We're seeing this latter point in full today here in Florida, where the governor of the state has emasculated any independence on the part of the state university system, as well as any independence on the part of the state Board of Regents by passing legislation that puts all of that under the governor's thumb.

The effects have been disastrous for the black and latino communities, to say nothing of expunging anything faintly controversial from the curricula overseen by the governor.

My point is not at all contemporary even as it is: to ask the best out of people is expensive, it takes time and effort, and it takes sacrifices, as well as the deepest understanding of what truly makes for happiness in the human being.

At this writing, none of the above applies here in Florida. Things are so grotesque here now that a newly elected Lieutenant Governor casually resigns his post and is named, without any degree except a bachelor's in economics, Chancellor of a university here, his alma mater. By the Governor of the state, through his control of the Board of Trustees of that university.

Challenges? They're all over the place. Those challenges await the people of Jesus who take the lifetime pains of immersing themselves in the disciplines of the art of prayer to God in order to energize their own souls into happinesses, as Jesus promised, and in order to energize them to take on the powers-that-be and try to change this world for the better.

As did Jesus of Nazareth.

3. Overwhelmed By Beauty And Ugliness - Peaks Of
Wonder, Quiet Laughter; Peaks Of Ugliness -
Nadirs Of Revulsion, Tears

As this essay is being written in mid-February of 2003, another shuttle disaster in the space program of our nation has happened, killing the seven astronauts aboard, destroying the shuttle, and at the same calling the entire space program into question. It also has stranded several more astronauts in the space station, who have to be rescued by the Russians.

This is the second such disaster of the shuttle program, both of them in part attributable to launches in wintertime. That problem is that cold air and cold rocket bodies shrink those bodies so that the plastics attached thereto are loosened, and when the vibrations of takeoff happen, break loose, as do the ices accumulated on the rocket bodies because of the 400 degrees below zero gases pumped into those rockets at the last minute, gases used for takeoff.

In the first disaster, it was also winter, and something called an "O Ring" a circular seal, failed because of shrinking from the cold temperatures, and with the failure, ignition of those loosed gases, and the entire shuttle exploded, killing all aboard. That was a judgement call at the time; the pressures from the White House to get that shuttle into space were fierce. That pressure overrode the professional judgements of the governmental staff (read: career imperilments) overseeing that launch.

Of course, the White House (Reagan) was all tears and funerary ceremonies, but the policy change that happened out of that disaster was partially to privatize the whole program. "Privatize" means to make a profit for private industry. Cut corners, and all that to ensure that the profit margin is the first consideration.

So that whole program eliminated many of the professionals who were under government sponsorship (that means federal money), and hence susceptible to government pressures (that means politics - in this case, presidential politics, which left no doubt back then that the shuttle was going to fly, come hell or high winds), and in their place put privatization, which makes the same questionable judgements concerning flight risks in terms of profit and loss as does the government with its understanding of its political pressures.

In neither case did NASA, nor anyone with influence associated with that organization conclude that it is too risky to launch shuttles in the winter - the most obvious of dangers to the program in the first place. Or install a set of regulations that took winter into consideration when at the risky edges of any given launch.

Worse, there is another way to get into space. It is simply by hooking two airplanes together, flying them to about 40,000 feet, and launching one, with rockets far less demanding and dangerous than the ones in current use, into space. Less expensive, too.

And that kind of shuttle, or plane, slowly comes back into the atmosphere under all kinds of control. Burt Rutan has done it twice.

The above is metaphor for this section, which is built on the experiences of those who are so incredibly sensitized to both beauty and ugliness through their committed prayer lives; the metaphor faces all of us with the undeniable and continuing beauty (of seeing the Earth in its entirety for the first time in history!) and ugliness (failures in the efforts in space) to do what we can to celebrate the beauty by struggling with all our might against the ugly, transforming it into expressions of grace that the uglies couldn't think of on their best day.

Another such metaphor is to happen across a stunning rose bush in the middle of the town dump.

There are all kinds of such metaphors about; one has simply to bring it all to focus, and not lose the focus on the ugly, because it sits there as challenge to the Christian at all times.

It is popular at this writing to ask what would Jesus do in various circumstances. As I look at the ugliness of war - Gulf War II - I am reminded of a poem by Wilfred Owen, the British and Christian poet who was swept into the sewers of WWI in France - the trenches.

He was eventually killed in those trenches, as were some TWENTY millions of other young men, leaving a poetic line by another WWI British poet, and friend of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon. The line is an elegy: "...half the seed of Europe perished there..." ; but Owen left a poem that spikes our hearts, where our commitments to Jesus of Nazareth are based, with this poem:

And there were no more bombs, of ours or theirs,
Not even an old flintlock, nor even a pikel.
But God was vexed, and gave all power to Michael;
And when I woke he'd seen to our repairs.

"...God was vexed..." If ever there was a phrase to speak of the work of a committed Christian in this bloody world of ours, it is this one. In eight lines, Owen sums up the dreams of peace, and ironically wakes up from the dream with a renewed strength to make war. Because God was vexed with God's creations.

Long ago, I experienced another such ugliness, a destroyed Germany, and the crippling remains of concentration camps in Germany and elsewhere in Europe at the end of WWII. It took me seven years of floundering about to come to the point where the message of Jesus Christ was imparted to me by a man who had been in those French trenches in WWI - the same trenches, at the same time, where Owen laid down his life.

All the efforts at prayer have never stopped wars...yet. Still, my efforts at prayer have always resulted in my soul experiencing the beauties of The Presence even at the same time my eyes are ever encountering uglinesses in this world.

One of the major uglinesses that has happened recently is the symbolic erection of the cross of Jesus Christ atop the White House - put there by a new Constantine, the II, who also has emblazoned that cross on the shields of his legions... Jesus leading us into war. My sense of beauty has been degraded by Constantine II.

To protest is easy - write the letters, > phone the politicians, join crusades against war. What is infinitely more difficult is to nurture one's faith in one's purposes amid such wars. Prayer, for me, is the major instrument of that nurture.

If I am overwhelmed by ugliness, I am also gifted with appreciations not only of beauty, but also with abilities to manufacture and/or appreciate beauties.

Without gilding the lily in this section, what I am trying to say is that a committed prayer life always leads one into sensitivities that are marvels to the nurtures of one's soul. Those sensitivities are in operation whether one is faced with ugliness or beauty. The task is to transform ugliness into beauty.

4. Sensing Tragedy In Apparent Happiness, and
Sensing Tragedy In Apparent Tragedy.

As any committed Christian knows, once engaged in the process of translating one's prayer experiences into considerations of action in the ugly portions of the world, there is no turning back. One either is slain, or burnt out, or made scapegoat, or betrayed by others, or succeeds in some measure of being an agent of the grace of God in such situations, but one is never ignored.

I was once called to minister to a family where the grandfather had backed up a truck full of sand and crushed his five year old grandson under the back wheels...after he had warned the boy not to go in back of the truck.

They all lived in a tiny village that had been bypassed once the timbering industry ran out of trees back in the later 1800s and early 1900s. The family owned a small "hotel" which survived because it was the only bar in the area.

There were three children in the family, and the five year old boy, the youngest, was the only normal one of the lot. The other two had anomalies of the body that had required much by way of surgeries and other medical care. The oldest tended bar at the hotel, and at twenty years of age, was already an alcoholic.

They were not church people. Right across the street from the hotel was a little old Methodist Church. I was asked by the emergency squad to handle the funeral. When I arrived at the hotel, I was almost overcome by the squalor of the setting, and to sit in the kitchen and talk with the family was most difficult because all I wanted to do was cry at the tragedy.

The family was open, and had a sense of resignation about their fate, dulled in their spirits. So we prayed together awkwardly, and I left. The funeral was held two days later, at the funeral home of the region. Everyone in that little village showed up.

I stood by the coffin and said that I didn't think that anything in my prayer book applied to this situation. The grandfather had intended well, did what was normal and cautionary in the situation, and had no idea that the boy would be entranced by a truck backing up, to the extent that he had to get closer in order to observe it in defiance of his grandfather. Or that the scene was so entrancing that he forgot what the grandfather had said.

So I closed the prayer book and said to the folks that it might be useful for all of us if they would speak about what they knew about the boy. One at a time, the villagers stood and offered their perceptions of the boy. He was a scamp; he was full of laughter;

he always volunteered to run to the store for anyone who needed that; he knew when the pies and cakes were being baked, and where - a collective portrait of the boy emerged, and it was clear that not only was he well loved by the villagers, but that he had also brought to everyone in that room some sense of the joy of living, of loving them in turn the way he had been loved.

By the time everyone had spoken, the mood of the gathering had changed completely from the glooms of tragedy to an unexpected and most welcome mood of happiness demonstrated by a smile, a tear of appreciation, a chuckle at the boy's behaviors. The boy was alive in their hearts.

At this point, I realized that we all had been praying together. Not formally, of course, but praying nonetheless, since prayer is always about relationships, as Jesus teaches in the Lord's Prayer. And I was startled by an insight that I immediately shared with the group. I said that it had just occurred to me that I had known a lot of people over the years who lived to be very old, many in their nineties, who had never known the kind of happiness that this boy of five years had brought to the village, and had experienced within himself.

Which in turn led to my involuntary coining of a line of poetry - "...time is not the distance, but the quality." It doesn't matter how long we live; what matters is the qualities of our lives while we live. Folks nodded in agreement.

I then asked everyone to join hands as I gave to thanks to God for the life of the boy, and the many ways in which he expressed and received the love of all who knew him, praying that as God had given the boy life, so too would God receive the boy in God's soul at his death. Amen.

There was a long, quiet sigh of relief from everyone. People stood up, and spontaneously exchanged hugs and handshakes. Tears continued to flow, but they were tears of appreciation, and were unashamed.

Tragedy in apparent happiness; happiness in apparent tragedy.

At this point of essay, I find myself back to wordlessness. Out of all the confusion and order of living in this life, there rests within my soul, heart and mind, a sense of my doing, and having done, what was wanted of me.

I do have some sense of the agonizing slowness with which we address the issues of our planet, and ourselves as individuals. For one close-at-hand example, I look to the black community of our nation. Over 400 years ago, they all were slaves. Slavery was normal, so much so that when the time came for America to break free of British dominion, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1776, the effort to write its own Constitution was marred in tragic fashion by the reluctance of the Fathers to struggle with the slavery issue, instead leaving it on the shelf for another time to try to cope. (Does that sound politically familiar, or what?)

A mere eighty-five years later, that sin of omission came home to America with a vengeance, with the splitting of the nation into two, and into a civil war that cost as many as a million military casualties, let alone civilian deaths and casualties via being shot at, starvation, exposure and epidemics over a four year period of war. Our Civil War. At that time, it was the bloodiest war in history.

The issue is still with us to this moment, and will not go away easily, if ever. There are forces very much at work, trying to undo whatever advances black people have made socially and economically; the present President is on record as wanting to obliterate, as one example, the laws regarding Affirmative Action, a government effort concerning admissions to colleges and universities that is designed to help black students gain entrance on something of an equal basis - the well known "level playing field" - in order to gain and affirm the kinds of education that would enable them to rise above the slavery levels of illiteracy and poverty.

That the wealthy people of this nation endorse this attempt at destruction and rollback of such efforts at freeing black people from shackles they haven't earned is mind-boggling, to say the least. Still, in people like me, what this reaction has caused is a doubling of energies and commitments to such a cause, preaching and reaching out wherever the situations present themselves to speak morals to the matter.

For several early years in my retirement, I had been befriended by a "redneck" native Floridian, a man who was a member of the Methodist church I attended. One day, he invited me to go deer hunting with him in the "game management" areas favored by Florida. First, he had to teach me how to shoot a black powder musket, for this was his favorite type of hunting. And so he did.

When it came time to hunt, another friend of his joined us, He was a native Vermonter, who had moved to Florida many years ago. Unknown to me, he was also a fanatic white racist. It all surfaced when we got to the game management area, and found that the Ranger who supervised that area was black, coal black, in fact.

As we left the entrance to go park the truck, and walk into the woods, the Vermonter snarled, "Goddam niggers!" over and over. I bit my tongue for the moment, and got through the day, which saw us get a deer.

When we returned to the motel to butcher the deer, the Vermonter kept it up, "Goddam niggers", over and over and over until at last, I snarled back, "Goddam you and your goddam niggers."

Silence descended, and I refused to apologize, as did the Vermonter. So we drove home in silence, and I left the pair, never to see them again. The friendship was broken, and then my friend died, and I have seen no more of his Vermonter friend.

I don't know what I accomplished in such a small frenzy of reaction, except that both of these people ran smack into someone who had not let up when it came to expressing what he perceived as the truth of the matter.

Most times, as the reader must know, that's all one can do. It is the accumulation of such small matters, as in the arts of prayer discipline, that finally lead to most consequential acts socially that speak, in this case, to the needs of such people as the black community.

I am willingly and happily part of that action of building matters to such critical points where something significant can happen to alleviate such situations, because I see it as part of God's actions amongst us. I have confidence in that kind of action because it's real, and if it is sometimes too slow for my taste, I also know that, as one of my friends noted earlier in this paper, "slow food is good food." The key is not to let up.

Another way of saying this is that it takes an awful lot of mountain to make a mountain top.

In retrospect, looking back 400 years, and looking now at the thousands and thousands of black people who have secured college educations, and are going on in good, solid lives, I know that while we're not where we could be yet, we are on the way. And as with any pilgrimage, the road remains filled with all kinds of dangers and fears. Pilgrimage has never been any different over all the centuries of mankind.

There are some 30 millions of black people in this nation. Something on the order of two thirds of that number are in the educational stream, one way or other, thanks to the political system which bowed before the wishes of the American people, and unlocked the treasuries that made that possible.

More is needed; if the political system shuts the door to those moneys and entrances, then we'll simply have to do something else. Maybe start new colleges. The key is not to stop trying; the key to that is not to stop praying to our God for guidance, inner strength and inspiration.

I cannot know the mind of God; I can know of purposes that are apparent, and need address. Whatever God's ultimate purposes are in these matters, I trust them.

So I arrive at the closure of this essay. It is with a feeling of relief and regret at the same time. Relief, that it is finally over; regret in that, as usual, I don't think I have been all that lucid with what I started to try to do - helping people in the prayer process that they might know for themselves the same kinds of joy as have I and countless millions, spiritual fullfillments, contributions to what used to be called the "common weal."

Regardless of my own ineptness, however, there is as consequence of my involvement over the years of my being and ministries an inner sense of peace that is not removable. The life of prayer as consequence of the commitment to God through Jesus of Nazareth has proved itself out, over and over again, even when I lost sight of what I was to do, or when I was betrayed and broken, or when my own ego got in the way of the whole process. One could hardly ask for more.

The existence of that inner peace is its own statement on the meanings and purposes of life. I am a happy person because of it all, and wish no other reward in this or any other life than that peace.

To my mind, it is God's stamp of approval.

What else is there to say? Except, maybe, peace to the reader.

Frank A. Halse, Jr.

15 Kimberly Drive
Apt. # A2D
Mexico, New York 13114
315-963-8401
fhalse@twcny.rr.com
February 2003
March 2003
November 2004